With booming development of Internet technologies, the Internet keeps growing in its information transmission capability, and network traffic is rapidly increasing at a compound annual growth rate of 50%. This requires a corresponding network access device to expand its capacity so as to accommodate demands of Internet development. A gateway device is mainly used for access of a home broadband user and an enterprise user to the Internet. With the capacity expansion of the network access device, a network service provider must deploy more gateway devices on a same site. A user's terminal device can be connected to a LAN Switch (aggregation switch) by using a DSLAM (Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer, digital subscriber line access multiplexer), and then the user's terminal device can be connected to a corresponding gateway device via the LAN Switch.
After accepting a connection request of the user's terminal device, the gateway device allocates an address to the user's terminal device, where the address used for allocation comes from an address pool bought by a network operator. Because multiple gateway devices exist on one site, effective management is required for address resources during running processes of the gateway devices so as to ensure stability of each running gateway device and effective utilization of the address pool.
An existing mainstream method for managing an address resource is as follows: After a user's terminal device is connected to a gateway device and allocated with an address and if an address pool in which the address exists does not belong to the gateway device connected the terminal device, a horizontal tunnel is used to implement unity of traffic paths. For example:
The user's terminal device is connected to a gateway device 2, but the address pool in which the allocated address exists belongs to a gateway device 1. For the purpose of the unity of traffic paths, a horizontal tunnel needs to be used between the gateway device 1 and the gateway device 2 to form horizontal traffic, so as to establish the following traffic path:
the user's terminal device-DSLAM-LAN Switch-the gateway device 2-the gateway device 1-CR (Core Router, core router), where the user's terminal device finally accesses the Internet through this traffic path.
In the process of implementing the present invention, the inventor finds that at least the following problem exists in the prior art:
Because many gateway devices exist on a same site and horizontal traffic between the gateway devices is heavy, a large number of ports of the gateway devices need to be occupied to establish horizontal tunnels, thereby causing waste of port resources and system performance deterioration.